Increasing the flexibility with which an optical transport network can assign and route wavelength channels has traditionally increased the efficiency of the network. Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) have greatly contributed to this increased flexibility by enabling wavelength channels to be selectively added or dropped at any node in the network. However, ROADMs employ fairly complex and expensive components to provide this flexible capability. Furthermore, many of these components are active, meaning that the ROADMs require a power supply infrastructure and an interface for managing faults and upgrades. ROADMs thus prove prohibitive in some contexts.
One such context relates to a network that efficiently transports the traffic of multiple services in a converged fashion. Rather than employing multiple different networks in parallel for transporting these different services (e.g., mobile, business, and residential services), a converged network transports those services together using the same network. A transport network that optically converges different services by transporting those services on different wavelength channels would be advantageous, for a variety of reasons, but has heretofore been stifled by long deployment cycles of equipment, organizational boundaries, and operator considerations. Such a transport network would be advantageous for instance because of its potential for large scalability and efficiency.